The Three Lives of the ‘Queen of the South’. The Saga of the Female Drug Trafficker in Puebla

The funeral service on May 27, 2018, at the IMSS wake in the La Piedad cemetery in Puebla, was a surreal event, even by the standards of a country with 19 years of “war” against drug trafficking: dozens prayed to a decapitated head.

The coffin was occupied only by the head of Alan Josué Bedolla that his murderers left on the street; the rest of the 23-year-old, his thin and athletic body, remained unlocated. Knowing that in Mexico disappearances can last forever, his family decided to hold a wake for him without his torso or limbs. “The rest will appear,” his uncle told local reporters. “The important thing is to bury his head so that his soul can rest.”

The prayers that Alan Josué had not suffered during his captivity were repeated as many times among the attendees as the desire for his body to appear soon. His mother, a veteran nurse, cried out that if God didn’t let her bury her son completely, she would prefer to die immediately. Five days later, her prayers were answered.

On June 1, inside a black bag at the entrance to San Juan Tianguismanalco in the Puebla municipality of Atlixco, ministerial agents found a body in an advanced state of decomposition… without a head. The tattoos and clothing confirmed that it was the young man who dreamed of being a professional motorcycle driver.

The Puebla authorities had come across these remains thanks to the confession of a recently arrested person, the same person who had ordered and carried out the murder of Alan Josué: Liliana Hernández, who called herself the Queen of the South.

State police couldn’t imagine it, but in the following years they would find other “queens of the south” in Puebla. A series of copycats of the nickname of Sandra Ávila Beltrán, the Queen of the Pacific, who would unleash a wave of murders in one of the most conservative and supposedly safest states in Mexico. All to emulate her criminal fame.

Sandra, the leader of cocaine traffickers between Mexico and Colombia

Sandra Ávila Beltrán, now 64, is probably the most famous drug trafficker in the country. Niece of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, founder of the Guadalajara Cartel; cousin of the Beltrán Leyva brothers; and wife of two important police commanders who worked for organized crime in Baja California and Mexico City; she dedicated her first 47 years of life to building a criminal career that didn’t need uncles, cousins ​​and husbands to stand out on its own.

At a time when women in drug trafficking only stood out for being trophy wives, stunning girlfriends or selfless caregivers, Ávila Beltrán created her own category as the leader of fearsome and skilled cocaine traffickers who had dealings in Mexico with the Sinaloa Cartel and in Colombia with the Norte del Valle Cartel. Admired and repudiated in equal measure, she took advantage of her lineage, beauty and cunning to become an icon of organized crime, far removed from traditional gender roles.

Her rise in the nineties, her arrest in 2007 and her reinvention in 2015 as a free woman has had an impact on pop culture that is only comparable to Pablo Escobar: her life inspired the writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte to write his novel ‘La Reina del Sur’ (2002) which later became the basis for a series of the same name starring actress Kate del Castillo, the frustrated dream of El Chapo Guzmán.

The muse of groups like Los Tigres del Norte and singers like Lupillo Rivera, she has been played in dozens of video homes by women who imitate her ‘femme fatal’ movements and who want to be like her, before and now, who has become an Instagram and TikTok influencer. This idolatry has reached the point that other criminals want to appropriate her alias using extreme violence. This is the case of her clones that emerged between 2018 and 2020 in Puebla.

Liliana, the head of a gang dedicated to huachicol

A week before the murder of Alan Josué Bedolla, the Puebla authorities were already looking for an imitator of the nickname of Sandra Ávila Beltrán. The alias appeared on the radar when three police officers found the body of a man who was being devoured by stray dogs – as reported by the local press – on the highway of the capital of Puebla. Next to the body, the murderers left a green cardboard with a message: “With this they’ll learn not to mess with the Queen of the South.”

The victim allegedly belonged to a gang of drug dealers and huachicoleros in the capital, the investigations focused on rivals. That way they would find out who this “queen” was with the techniques of a local boss. The investigations pointed to a group of fuel thieves in the Tecamachalco region, led by a sadistic ex-policeman named Jesús Martín Mirón, alias El Kalimba.

But he couldn’t be responsible, since he had been murdered by an armed criminal cell a year earlier, in 2017, when he entered a private clinic to have plastic surgery. Investigations continued and they discovered that his place was occupied by his ex-partner Liliana, who for a decade had quietly learned how to navigate organized crime. When she saw the empty space, she took it immediately.

The prosecution portrayed her as a dangerous and ruthless woman, especially when she was linked days later to the murder of a 12-year-old boy, whom she ordered to be killed with five shots because he was the favorite son of a man who owed her money.

Then, Alan Josué’s head appeared in a flowerbed in the Plaza de la Higuera in San Bartolo. This Queen of the South – who used the alias created by Pérez-Reverte – killed as if she were in a hurry, so the prosecution stepped up its pace. On May 31, in a joint operation between the state prosecutor’s office and the Puebla Public Security Secretariat, two houses were simultaneously searched in the Arboledas de Loma Bella and Balcones del Sur neighborhoods. Their hiding places.

In one of the houses they found 30 kilos of marijuana and dozens of doses of heroin, cocaine and crystal meth; in another, Liliana, with her new partner, her bodyguard and another accomplice. The raid went down so fast that the suspects couldn’t even reach their weapons in time. It wouldn’t take long for them to confess their crimes. The authorities celebrated the arrest with a press conference. The right-hand man of the PAN governor José Antonio Gali, Diódoro Carrasco, boasted the end of a brief but terrifying reign.

However, the celebration was also fleeting. In Puebla, another Queen of the South would soon appear.

Beatriz, the leader of the drug dealing gang

For a small colony, Minerales del Sur, became a great chaos on November 26, 2019. That afternoon, agents of the state prosecutor’s office carried out an operation against a group of drug dealers who had accumulated months of undercover surveillance; They had to serve three arrest warrants against their targets, the agents were accompanied by state police who would watch their backs. They had all been warned that it would be a dangerous assignment.

When the agents surrounded the house of one of the leaders, the social base of the drug dealers took to the streets to prevent the arrest. A crowd gathered and the pushing soon turned into kicks and punches; then into gunfire fired by civilians with AR-15 and AK-47 rifles and uniformed men with nine-millimeter pistols. One of those bullets pierced the body of policeman Jesús N., better known as Commander Veneno. His murder enraged his colleagues, who called in reinforcements from the surrounding neighborhoods to arrest as many rioters as they could.

Eighteen months had passed since the arrest of Liliana, the huachicolera, when the Puebla police arrested 26 residents for the lynching in Minerales del Sur and discovered that among them was the alleged mastermind of the murder of Commander Veneno. Beatriz, the head of the gang of drug dealers, also forced her subordinates to call her Queen of the South. 

The surprise arrest failed to convince the judge of Beatriz’s criminal involvement and she was released a few days later. But a police officer doesn’t forget or forgive. Even less a “cop killer.” So the fallen officer’s colleagues dedicated themselves to investigating her to try their luck at a second arrest. 

With the energy generated by revenge, the police investigated her past and found that they were dealing with a highly dangerous woman due to her ties to local cartels. If they didn’t act soon, Beatriz would surely go after them for having put her in prison for a few days. So the police gathered as much evidence as possible in the shortest time possible and brought them before a judge to charge her with aggravated homicide, wilful injury, damage to another’s property, criminal association and crimes against health in the form of possession of methamphetamines for sale. On September 15, 2019, hungry for revenge, prosecutors arrested the second woman to be nicknamed Queen of the South.

Beatriz never reached the levels of fame of Sandra Ávila Beltrán, but at least once she did make it to the local newspapers for a social event: in June 2020, while in prison, she married another inmate from the Ciudad Serdán prison. “In prison, in the middle of a pandemic, the Queen of the South gets married,” read the Puebla newspapers on July 1, which would soon reprint the nickname.

The wedding caused a stir for three reasons: in that prison, cohabitation between men and women is supposedly prohibited; The wedding was held in violation of all social distancing rules, as the country was experiencing the advance of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic; the groom was Juan Carlos N., a former municipal police officer from Cuautlancingo accused of belonging to a criminal gang called Los Mollejas.

Cecilia, the audacious arms dealer

Beatriz had been married for only seven days when state media discovered the third Queen of the South. This time her name was Cecilia.

The 32-year-old woman had been on the state government’s list of priority targets for some time. A danger on the move and everywhere: partner of the famous huachicolero Loco Téllez, girlfriend of El Moco, boss of La Hierba and leader of El Orejas. Her address book was a directory of the most dangerous criminals in the state with whom she maintained constant business in the so-called Red Triangle, where fuel and gas theft is rampant.

In the towns of Ahuazotepec, Huauchinango, Zacatlán, Chignahuapan and San Martín Texmelucan, Cecilia had the rank of lieutenant. Those who followed her trail counted up to 50 men under her command who tapped into the Petróleos Mexicanos pipelines, stole cargo trucks, trafficked weapons and dominated the sale of crystal meth. Anyone who dared to challenge her or dispute a route, encountered the fury of her followers.

Thanks to dozens of text messages discovered on the cell phones of arrested drug dealers, the police patiently set up an operation against them. On August 8, 2020, dozens of agents waited for Cecilia to enter a home in Ahuazotepec with a recently collected package to arrest her. They surrounded the house, broke in, and handcuffed her. On the table in the center of the living room there were about 100 packages of cocaine that were ready to be sold on the streets.

Once again, the Puebla government called a press conference to boast about its most recent capture. And in the offices of the state police, with a simple white blouse and blue jeans, Cecilia looked like any other member of crime: she had in front of her a few packages of drugs and a tiny knife that didn’t save her from arrest. Despite her common appearance, the press once again hammered her alias: “The Queen of the South Falls.” The third.

“Once a woman understands that violence is power, as [Colombian drug trafficker] Griselda Blanco did since she was 11 years old, they get rid of that brainwashing of women who are always weak and victims. Women have the same capacity for violence as men, especially because violence is now exercised more with firearms, not with fists,” says Deborah Boello, journalist and author of the book Narcas: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America’s Cartels (2023).

Something interesting happens. In addition to Puebla, other states have their own southern queens: Cheyla Ruth N. is the Queen of the South, but from the State of Mexico; Amanda Rachelle is also the Queen of the South in Sinaloa. And Leny S. is the Queen of the South in Yucatan.

If it’s true that imitation is the best compliment, Sandra Ávila Beltrán is full of flowers like poppies. A “queen” in each daughter that drug dealer gave you.

Source: Milenio